Longfellow, in "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha," and the "New England
Tragedies," sought his topics in the history and traditions of the New
World.

To me "Hiawatha" seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is quite
full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds, weather, and
wind and snow. Everything lives with a human breath, as everything
should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk, to whom all the
world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of course there are
lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us in the lay of the
mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told
that

"the gentle Chibiabos
_Sang in tones of deep emotion_!"

"Tones of deep emotion" may pass in a novel, but not in this epic of the
wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy record of
those dim, mournful races which have left no story of their own, only
here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest leaves.

A poet's life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he knew
as little of Burn's as of Shakespeare's? Of Longfellow's there is
nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it--his poetry, the
voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever bore. I think
there are not many things in poets' lives more touching than his silence,
in verse, as to his own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddles not with
it, and he kept secret his brief lay on that insuperable and
incommunicable regret. Much would have been lost had all poets been as
reticent, yet one likes him better for it than if he had given us a new